Chapman Taylor Architects
A global leader in the design of creative and successful places and spaces, Chapman Taylor’s IT goes green.
Nittygritty has managed Chapman Taylor’s IT since 2007, aligning technology with the needs of creativity and business strategy.
We ensure the IT infrastructure, systems and architectural practice all function smoothly in a deadline driven firm of 165 people, including office moves and relocations (see below for services provided).
About Chapman Taylor
Chapman Taylor (CT) has amassed an impressive list of awards and is an international practice of architects, masterplanners and interior designers. With experience in every major industry sector, CT specialises in Retail, Leisure, Hospitality, Residential, and Office design and, in particular, the combination of these uses into large scale mixed-use environments.
With 19 regional design studios across Asia, Central & South America, Europe, and the Middle East, CT works as a collaborative and cohesive group, pooling skills and resources where appropriate to deliver world-class design solutions. For more on CT please visit ChapmanTaylor.com
About Our Work at Chapman Taylor
In 2007, CT had eight full height server racks of computer and telephony equipment. All of this on-premise equipment had a large power draw and required two air conditioning units to cool the server room.
As CT have moved premises over the intervening years, we’ve facilitated a significant decrease in the amount of server room equipment moved each time, until we are now down to a single rack of equipment, with an extremely small footprint. This has been lead by three main factors.
Virtualisation
Where once a physical server was needed for every backend service, filling a server room with a large number of under-utilised servers, virtualisation has meant consolidation of services onto a smaller and smaller number of servers, running at better and higher utilization levels. Today, CT is down to two primary servers and a single secondary server for the whole workload.
Cloud Services
The second important factor has been CT’s adoption of cloud services. They were early adopters of Microsoft’s Office 365 Exchange Online platform, allowing them to move all of their email infrastructure out of their datacenter and into the cloud.
Cloud Based VOIP
A final factor was the adoption of cloud based Voice Over IP (VOIP) for their telephony needs. A whole rack of telephone systems, and another rack of telephone connection patching has been replaced by a small box that connects to a hosted VOIP solution, again pushing equipment off-premise and into the cloud.
Results
Good for the Environment and Great for Chapman Taylor
This all means that CT is less dependent on its head-office based server room and allows for:-
- Better disaster recovery and business continuity planning
- Better access to these resources for their offices outside of London.
- Increased connectivity and remote working facilitation
- Reduced cost of ownership
- Increased ability to move other applications and services to the cloud in the future
It also means that the environmental impact of the London server room is now an order of magnitude smaller than it has been before.
Other Services Provided
NGneer® Infrastructure support, strategic consulting, reporting, planning and strategic advice
- BigFileBox, file transfer app
- TeamWarden, password security app
Trinity Leeds Mall - Winner of the 'Best of the Best' designed shopping centre in the World award 2015
Global Harbor, Shanghai - Winner of 'Best Retail Architecture in the World' Award at the International Property Awards, 2014-15
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